Musings and Sometimes Rants about the non-equal status of Fathers in Family Law and Parenting. Additionally periodic comparisons to the treatment of men compared to women in other areas including health care.

Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Below we have another group seeking Family Law reform starting in
Sarnia. I wish them well. Hopefully they will align themselves with the
Canadian Equal Parenting Council, a National umbrella group lobbying
for shared/equal parenting change.

Vested interests in
the Department of Justice and Attorney General`s departments within
Provinces are resisting reform for shared/equal parenting and the
following post I placed in the Ottawa Citizen today helps explain why.

MikeMurphy

1:04 PM on August 30, 2011

The
Canadian Bar Association (CBA) is the main lobby group of Lawyers in
Canada, yet they are not registered as lobbyists. They can have the
Canadian Head of State as their main speaker, a member of the same lobby
group, without any one giving it a second thought.

Last year
in Ireland they had the Justice Minister do a speech where he was
directly lobbied to not act on PMB-C-422 for shared/equal parenting.
This same Minister acquiesced to this blatant attempt at lobbying by
stating the government did not support it.

A definition of
corruption is abuse of the system. We have a lobby group, the CBA,
acting as a vested interest in protecting family law lawyers from the
potential of lost business due to the enactment of legislation that
would reduce their need, especially in court litigation.

I do not think the CBA is capable of reform without independent oversight. It will not come from the
Legislative branch until we see fewer lawyers operating in that sphere as
lawmakers. Only in the area of the law
can we see such direct conflicts of interest, very similarly to the Canadian
Head of states recent speech.

At least he told his colleagues
they need to fix their very leaky roof.

The Sarnia Observer

Fix sought for family law

By SHAWN JEFFORDS, The Observer

Updated 1 day ago

Ontario's family law system is broken and a new group formed in Sarnia is lobbying the government for a permanent fix.

Canadians
For Family Law Reform was founded in April by eight city residents who
have been through the family law system. Two of the co-founders, Anna
Moscardelli and Jim Canie, said the current structure turns spouse
against spouse, often bankrupting both, as they fight over child custody
and assets.

"The court system has developed these animosities between ex-spouses," Moscardelli said.

The
group, which supports men and women, wants to see the government
overhaul the family law system. A focus on mediated solutions, not long,
drawn out court battles would be a good place to start, Moscardelli
said.

"For me, it took seven years, 364 days from the time the original motion was filed until the final order came down," she said.

Moscardelli
said she knows of a local couple who were married for four years and
divorced, only to fight it out in the courts for 11 years before
reaching a resolution.

Moscardelli's own lengthy court battle destroyed what was left of her relationship with her ex-husband and hurt their children.

"It's really the kids who lose out in all of this," she said.

The
group would also like to see greater accountability measures placed on
family law lawyers, some of whom draw out cases to make more money, she
said.

"(Some lawyers) look at it like, they don't make money resolving cases," she said. "It's a huge moneymaking system."

Canie
said the system also creates undue stress for families. His court
proceedings have affected his health. He now regularly takes blood
pressure medication and sleeping pills so he can rest at night.

"The stress is unbearable," he said.

Canie
said people who can't afford lawyers find themselves lost in a pile of
complicated paperwork.

Even those who can afford a lawyer sometimes
can't find one to take on their case, he said.

"Individuals just don't know what to do," he said. "They don't know where to start."

The
group will host a public meeting Sept. 8 from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m., at the
Sarnia Library downtown.

They're encouraging people to come out and
share their stories. The group has already sent letters to Attorney
General Chris Bentley, Ombudsman Andre Marin and Law Society of Upper
Canada asking each to take action.

"We need some change because the current system just isn't cutting it," Moscardelli said.

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Melanie Phillips, as she often does, gets right to the heart of the underlying root cause of the London Riots. She
says it far better than I have and its simple. Parents are at fault and
more particularly single parent female families are ill equipped to
handle teen boys. Shared equal parenting and stopping the incentive's
to single female births will be a good start. What if we required
these single mom parents to take out an insurance policy to pay for the
future damage their children will cause?MJM

Goodbye to the Enlightenment

An illuminating report on BBC
Radio Four’s Today programme (0810) this morning said it all about the
British riots. Some teenage thugs who were hooding up to go looting were asked
why they were doing it. Maybe they couldn’t afford the trainers and other goods
they were setting out to steal? Yeah, we can afford them, came the reply; but
since the goods were there to be robbed, it was an opportunity that couldn’t be
passed up. What about their parents? Did they know where they were? Yeah, came
the reply, but the most they do is shout at me. And as for the police, well the
worse that can happen is that I’ll get as ASBO (antisocial behaviour order).

Some of the rioters and looters are as young as eight or nine.
I then listened to a spokesman for Manchester city council appealing to parents
to ensure that their children are not on the streets tonight. Why can’t people
see what is staring us all in the face? We are not up against merely feral
children. We are up against feral parents. Of course the parents know their
children are out on the streets. Of course they see them staggering back with what
they have looted. But either they are too drunk or drugged or otherwise out of
it to care, or they are helping themselves to the proceeds too.

The parents are the problem; as are, almost certainly, their
parents and their parents too. Not that any of them necessarily even know who
their parents, in the plural, are. For the single most crucial factor behind
all this mayhem, behind the total breakdown of any control or self-control amongst the
rampaging gangs of children and teenagers who are rioting, burning, robbing,
stealing, attacking and murdering, is the willed removal of the most important
thing that socialises children and turns them from feral savages into
civilised citizens: a fully committed, hands-on, there-every-day father.

Many of us have been saying the two parent family as the bedrock of
modern civilization is essential, and the Judiciry giving sole physical
custody to moms, in Canada over 90% of the time, is resulting in
generatuions of children lacking a moral compass, often inspired by a
dad. The recent London riots have given rise to the proof of these
assertions. Given we are unlikely to impact the divorce rate without
governments encouraging families to stay together, getting equal/shared
parenting is essential in order to keep fathers and infrequently moms in
the lives of their children after divorce.

It's ironic
the Judges involved in the prosecution of the looters are asking where
the parents are. Some of these same judges may have been responsible
for separating the children from their fathers and not enforcing access
when he tried to see them.MJM

Now we have proof that abolishing parental
rights and encouraging single-parent families was disastrous: the
disaster has happened

What was done by design can be undone the same way. But will there be enough political determination to do it?

Last Thursday, in an article
snappily entitled “Why didn’t the looters’ parents know where they
were? Why didn’t they teach them about right and wrong? Answer: society
has undermined the family”, I quoted Fr Finigan saying
that “For several decades our country has undermined marriage, the
family, and the rights of parents… Now all of a sudden, we want parents
to step in and tell their teenage children how to behave”, and Melanie
Phillips pointing to “family breakdown and mass fatherlessness” as one
of the principal underlying causes of the riots and looting of last
week.

I concluded (and I don’t apologise for returning to this theme
now: a lot more needs to be said about it, and now is the time to say
it) that of all the things the government now needs to do, “it’s the
married family which is the institution that needs rebuilding most
urgently”.

I am as certain of that as anything I have ever
written, and I’ve been saying it for over 20 years: I was saying it, for
instance, when I was attacking (in the Mail and also the Telegraph) as
it went through the Commons the parliamentary bill which became that
disastrous piece of (Tory) legislation called the Children Act 1989,
which abolished parental rights (substituting for them the much weaker
“parental responsibility”), which encouraged parents not to spend too
much time with their children, which even preposterously gave children
the right to take legal action against their parents for attempting to
discipline them, which made it “unlawful for a parent or carer to smack
their child, except where this amounts to ‘reasonable punishment’;” and
which specified that “Whether a ‘smack’ amounts to reasonable punishment
will depend on the circumstances of each case taking into consideration
factors like the age of the child and the nature of the smack.” If the
child didn’t think it “reasonable” he could go to the police. It was an
Act which, in short, deliberately weakened the authority of parents over their children and made the state a kind of co-parent.

There
are, of course, many other causes for the undermining of the married
family (which David Cameron says he now wants to rebuild). Divorce, from
the 1960s on, became progressively easier and easier to obtain. Another
cause has been the insidious notion (greatly encouraged by successive
governments but particularly under New Labour – Old Labour tended to be
much more traditional in its views on the family) that the family has
many forms, that marriage is just one option, and that lone parenting is
just as “valid” (dread word) a form as any other. If you thought that
voluntary lone parenting should be discouraged, rather than (as it was)
positively encouraged by the taxation and benefits system, you were
practically written off as a fascist.

Well, all this relativist
rubbish has now been comprehensively shown by its consequences to have
been dangerous drivel all along; and I am discovering that to be able to
say “I told you so” is under the circumstances not at all as enjoyable
as I had thought it might be: any satisfaction is of a very grim kind.

But
it is now beyond any doubt, and we need to say so now, to nail the lies
that have been spouted for the last 40 years once and for all. The
conclusive proof of the existence and the effects of the widespread
breakdown of parental responsibility (even where there are two parents)
and also of the catastrophic consequences of the encouragement of lone
parenting was to be found on the front page of the Times on Saturday, in
an article to which I can’t give a link since you can’t get it online.
I will have to summarise and quote extensively.

The headline was “Judge asks: where are the parents of rioters?” and it opens as follows:

Parents
who refuse to take responsibility for children accused of criminal
offences were condemned by a judge yesterday who demanded to know why
the mother of a 14-year-old girl in the dock over the looting of three
shops was not in court.
District Judge Elizabeth Roscoe was
incredulous when told that the girl’s parents were too busy to see their
daughter appear before City of Westminster magistrates after she was
accused of offences during the violent disorder in London this week. She
said that many parents “don’t seem to care” that their children were in
court facing potentially lengthy custodial sentences.
Her
comments echoed those a day earlier by District Judge Jonathan Feinstein
when he highlighted the absence of parents at hearings in Manchester.
“The parents have to take responsiblity for this child – apart from one
case I have not seen any father or mother in court,” he said.

The
Times had been conducting an investigation into the cause of the riots,
and interviews with young people and community workers on estates
across London revealed “deep concerns about the lack of parental
authority”. Youth workers said that mothers (presumably in such cases
there are no fathers) are “too terrified of their own children to
confront them and often turn a blind eye to cash or stolen goods brought
home”. Lone parenthood, it emerges, is in fact a primary cause of the
August riots (as they are beginning to be called):

An
analysis by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) found that,
among other factors linking the 18 areas worst hit by public disorder,
is a high rate of single-parent families and broken homes.

And in
an interview with the Times today, Shaun Bailey, a youth worker recently
appointed as the Government’s “Big Society” czar, argues that
childraising has been “nationalised”.

Of the defendants who
appeared before magistrates in Westminster yesterday accused of riot
crimes across London, half were aged under 18, but few parents attended
the hearings, even though their children had been in police custody for
up to two days.
One member of the court’s staff said: “I can’t
recall seeing any of the parents down here”… A boy of 15 was accused of
looting a JD Sports shop in Barking, East London. A 17-year-old student
from East London was also accused of receiving £10,000 of mobile phones,
cigarettes and clothing looted from Tesco. The items and small quantity
of cannabis were discovered in his bedroom at the family home…
community workers admitted that broken families often led to children
taking to crime.

One youth worker, who has helped children in
Lambeth, south London, for 20 years, told the Times that single mothers
were often scared of their sons. “They would not challenge them if they
came home with stolen goods,” the worker, who did not wish to be named,
said.

“In some cases these young men steal more than their mother
earns or gets in benefit. They become the father figure, the main
earner.” Young men echo the lack of authority. “My mum can’t tell me
what to do,” said Lee, 18, from Copley Court, an estate in West Ealing.
“It’s the same with young kids. Most of their dads left early on and
they don’t listen to anyone.”

There isn’t much more to be said: all one can do is repeat oneself. We now know
what rubbish it is to deny that lone parenthood should be avoided
wherever possible. As for marriage, study after study has shown that
from the point of view of the child it is the best and most stable basis
for the family. In the 50s, everyone, including governments of all
colours, knew that marriage was the foundation of social
stability: and a man whose wife stayed at home to look after the
children didn’t pay any tax at all until he was earning the average
national wage.

That whole dispensation was blown apart by the
accursed supposed “liberation” of the 60s, and by political ideologies
of various kinds, not least by radical feminism. There was nothing
inevitable about it: it was done by deliberate political design. And
what political design can do, political design can undo. It’s more
difficult – much more difficult – of course and it can’t be done
overnight. David Cameron, to be fair, does seem to see some of this (IDS
sees even more).

But does he have the political determination
actually to do it? We shall see. I am hopeful; I always am at first. But
I greatly fear that as month succeeds month, even my own tendency
towards sunny optimism will begin first to flag and then to die. And
this time, I don’t want to be able to say “I told you so”.

About Me

I am Politically active and right of centre on most issues with the odd exception such as legalization of "Mary Jane".
I advocate on changes to Family Law - an incredibly dysfunctional arena where parents are pitted against one another and children are the victims.
My picture will sometimes show me as a younger man simply because I like them.

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Leading causes of Injury to Women 2006

In 2006, unintentional falls were the leading cause of nonfatal injury among women of every age group, and rates generally increased with age. Women aged 65 years and older had the highest rate of injury due to unintentional falls (59.7 per 1,000 women), while slightly more than 19 per 1,000 women aged 18–34 and 35–44 years experienced fall-related injuries. Unintentional injuries sustained as motor vehicle occupants were the second leading cause of injury among 18- to 34-year-olds (18.7 per 1,000), while unintentional overexertion was the second leading cause of injury among women aged 35–44 and 45–64 years (13.7 and 9.3 per 1,000, respectively). Among women aged 65 years and older, being unintentionally struck by or against an object was the second leading cause of injury (5.7 per 1,000).

Injury related Emergency Department Visits

Unintentional and intentional injuries each represented a higher proportion of emergency department (ED) visits for men than women in 2005. Among women and men aged 18 years and older, unintentional injuries accounted for 19.9 and 27.5 percent of ED visits, respectively, while intentional injuries, or assault, represented 1.4 and 2.7 percent of visits, respectively. Among both women and men, unintentional injury accounted for a higher percentage of ED visits among those living in non-metropolitan areas, while adults living in metropolitan areas had a slightly higher percentage of ED visits due to intentional injury.